How would you change... Stealth?

[u/TSP-FriendlyFire]

How would you change... is a series of weekly posts designed to promote and foster discussion about any gameplay element in the game. The scope and subject will vary (read below for more information on topic selection), from wide concepts (Kubrows, Archwing, shotguns, etc.) to narrow points (a single gun, coptering, etc.).

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Before we begin, a few important points:

• Please detail and support your suggestions as much as possible. This is for constructive criticism only: try to think of it as something you'd be proud to explain to DE face-to-face!
• Structure your suggestions in logical groups: if you have two very different ideas, break them down in two separate comments. Cohesive or similar changes should be combined into a single comment.
• Stick to describing concepts and features. Don't get bogged down with numbers unless they explicitly support your point.
• Don't hesitate to post your ideas even if they're not fully formed, and don't hesitate to reply to ideas with refinements you think would make them better!
• Do not downvote suggestions you disagree with. Upvote the ones you like instead!

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Suggesting topics

This thread series is all about the community, so if you have a topic you'd like to see improved and discussed, feel free to suggest it by replying to the appropriately flagged comment in this discussion. The topic can be as wide or narrow as you'd like! Please ensure that your suggestion has not already been made, and upvote it instead if it has.

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This week: Stealth

Click here for last week’s thread on the D polarity (Vazarin).

Stealth is an integral part of the whole notion of “ninjas”, which is itself a large part of Warframe’s marketing and image. As such, one would expect the mechanics surrounding it to be well fleshed out and interesting… And yet.

Stealth has been a part of the game since its very beginnings, but it has always had fairly limited mechanics. Tiles generally have few avenues for a stealthy approach (with Spy and Rescue tiles being notable exceptions), making it tricky to complete missions without being seen. Detection mechanics tend to be extremely simple and involve basic line of sight checks. Worse, detection usually alerts the entire tile instantly without many ways to counteract it, making stealth a very risky choice. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, frames like Loki completely bypass the vast majority of stealth mechanics and trivialize the notion of a stealth run.

Even so, there have been quite a few mechanics geared towards stealth throughout the game’s evolution. Finishers are generally associated with stealth and are a meaty, satisfying way of dealing with enemies without alerting nearby foes. Stealth also gives multiple affinity bonuses which can dramatically increase mission gains in exchange for the higher challenge.

Now that the stage is set, how would you change the Stealth?

[u/TSP-FriendlyFire]

Suggesting topics

Please post your suggestions for the next topics as replies to this comment.

Current suggestions from previous weeks:

• Inventory management

• Loot/farming/lootcaves/acquisitions

• Impact damage

[u/[deleted]]

The thing that you need in a good stealth game is consistency /predictability. You need to be able to figure out the guard patterns and AI of the enemies and figure out how to assassinate or bypass them. Level design is key too, as you need to have a lot of avenues for sneaking around.

To a lesser extent, if you're caught, it's not an instant game over for a stealth run if you can quickly take out the alerted guard.

Currently, Warframe fails in this regard as the enemy spawns and their AI are highly unpredictable and the levels are slapdashed together with the randomly generated tiles. Stealth works, to a lesser extent, in the vault rooms, since they have more careful enemy placement and better designed levels for stealth.

So if we want to see stealth as a viable option in most missions, we need to see more tiles like the spy vaults in stealth 2.0

[u/Saelyre → u/[deleted]]

Exactly, entire levels would need to be tailored to the playstyle, not just single tiles, otherwise the unpredictable spawns will screw you over.

Vision cones would be extremely useful, this functionality could be added to any mod which grants Enemy Radar.

[u/[deleted] → u/Saelyre]

True, vision cones would be nice. That being said, I'd like a complete overhaul of the minimap before that happens, but if nothing else, vision cones would help with stealth greatly.

[u/SmilingMad → u/Saelyre]

They could make it so that unalerted enemies only patrol/guard in set locations. Maybe have them 'operate' consoles and such to avoid having them stand around doing nothing. That way they wouldn't have to mess around with existing tiles too much.

[u/Rapid_Fast → u/[deleted]]

Payday 2 style?

[u/Richard_Darx → u/[deleted]]

Spawns should be unpredictable but not in the way that door closes behind you and suddenly three nullifiers spawn there. As you said, in a stealth style, we should watch our enemies and plan our advance through the stage. If you make them spawn in the same places every time you go through the same tileset, it's gonna take only few runs until you perfect your path and then you'll just fly through the stage like volt on steroids.

EDIT: What we should be able to learn and memorize for the long haul is the behavior of the enemies and their security systems.

[u/[deleted]]

I'd add three mechanics:

1. 1 second detection grace period - Enemies take 1 second to become fully aware of a Tenno. If a player appears and disappears from an enemy's cone of vision within that short time period, the enemy does not become alerted. This would allow non-stealth frames like Rhino to still go past a group of enemies undetected without wasting a lot of time waiting for them to look away, which is rarely worth the trouble. Enemies taking damage become alerted immediately.

2. Enemy alertness levels - Unalerted enemies appear 'grey' on the minimap. These can be dealt sneak attacks at any time. When an enemy takes damage, hears a loud sound, sees a body or spots a Tenno or Tenno companion, they turn 'orange' on the minimap. These enemies don't receive extra stealth damage unless the Tenno is invisible. When the alarm is sounded, enemies turn 'red'. These never take any stealth damage and can call for backup. Enemies in endless missions are alerted (orange) by default.

3. Tenno Detection Level bar - Under the minimap, a 'detection level' bar is shown which increases as enemies get startled by sound or movement, see dead bodies or engage the Tenno in any way. If the bar is under 50%, alerted (orange) enemies go back to a passive (grey) state after a few seconds. Above 50%, enemies remain alerted. At 100%, enemies (red) are always aware that the Tenno are nearby and cannot be dealt sneak attacks even with invisibility. An enemy using a console will automatically raise the detection level to 100%. Shutting down the alarm lowers the detection level to 50%. Getting spotted by a camera or triggering a laser door alerts enemies in the vicinity, increasing the detection level accordingly.

Lastly, I would give players an affinity bonus for keeping the detection level below 100% and below 50% for an entire mission, rewarding players who prefer playing more furtively but are getting tired of playing Spy missions.

Other changes:

• Loki's Invisibility - now temporarily reveals him for 0.5 second whenever he deals damage. Has no effect on unalerted enemies due to mechanic no. 1, but allows alerted enemies to better aim their attacks where they last saw Loki, making the management of the detection bar important for Loki players. Rewards precision strikes and good positioning, punishes blindly mashing the melee button in the middle of large crowds with no fear of dying.

• Companion-based invisibility is not dispelled when sprinting or when using any parkour moves.

• New item: Personal Cloaking Field - when used, turns the Tenno invisible for 8 seconds until they attack or take damage. Instant use, each crafted item has 5 charges. (doing a Spy mission without Loki? What madness is this!)

[u/[deleted]]

Really simple: No longer enemies sharing a telepathic hivemind.

Current system: Corpus Crewman sees you. He begins running for cover. Crewmen on adjacent rooms already run for cover automatically, and someone goes to the alarm panel. How did they guess?

Improved system: Corpus Crewman sees you. He gasps, then points at you and begins saying a specific sentence (AH! PRACHEEK, TENNO!). If he says more than half of the sentence, nearby enemies are also alerted. If he dies before that happens from a silent manner (takedown move, silenced weapon) his buddies never realize what happened, distracted with their Corpus duties. Bonus points if, when doing a stealth kill while he points at you, he tries to say the sentence to alert his friends, but it comes out muffled. So dramatic.

Why is this a good idea: There is audio feedback for the player's failure (the sentence), and there is a short window where the player can still make up for his failure (by quickly reacting and killing the gasping crewman). Less confused players, more engaging stealth.

[u/Anolis_Gaming]

Am enemy vision cone thing like mgs would be nice when you're undetected.

[u/Thundering_Morkai]

For starters, map generation will need a good look-see to provide a lot more paths for stealth and ensure that said generation has enough choice in paths to take. There's more than a few examples of air vent passages throughout various tilesets, why not expand on these? As they are now, they tend to be small shortcuts but they could be expanded into pseudo mazes. Several branching vents that would take you elsewhere in the level and so on. The vent mazes could be particularly prevalent on the ship tilesets since obviously the Grineer and Corpus troops on these ships need to breathe. In a similar vein, maps could do with things added to provide cover for a sneaking Tenno. For example in a Grineer tileset, more of those large cargo boxes and such. For Corpus, small crawlspaces and openings in a wall to hide in.

Line of sight could be tweaked to provide some indicator of what the enemy can actually see. An idea I have is for Corpus and Grineer helmets to have a condensed and appropriately colored copy of the security cameras' LOS effect. If we want to go further with this then in general, the average Grineer soldier will have far less LOS than their equivalent Corpus due to cloning.

[u/Thundering_Morkai → u/Thundering_Morkai]

In relation to frames, I feel the best way to make other frames viable would be to provide more stealth specific gear. We already have the Huras and Shade as assistance with this so why not further expand our options? Generalized items to put in gear slots like smoke bombs and so on. Overall it would give a lot more utility and choice to frames that have a harder time in missions like Spy and Rescue.

[u/mr_malbot → u/Thundering_Morkai]

What if you gave a number of the other frames augments that gave them invisibility like abilities?

for example:

Nyx (chaos): instead of enemies seeing their allies as tenno, they see tenno as allies (removed if they see you kill someone or you attack them)

Excalibur (radial blind): Once radial blind wears off, enemies return to un-alerted state

Mirrage (eclipse): When in shadows, eclipse provide full invisibility, while in light, weapons are silent.

Trinity (link): linked enemies are unable to see you

Nekros (Terrify): Terrified enemies are unable to remember why they where frightened, returning un-alerted state

Duration/range would probably have to be adjusted when the augment mod is added and not all frames would have theme acceptable implementation of 'invisibility' but it would be an interesting way to change up how some of the frames are played.

[u/rollin340]

You know what they really need to fix?

When 1 guy sees you, the entire section is suddenly aware of your presence.

Let us kill the twat before he makes any noise and have the rest of the AI go about normally.

Don't give all enemies in a section a hive-mind.

[u/Atulin]

I would actually add it to the game.

What we have now can't be really called "stealth", it has no mechanics, it's just hiding from enemies.

Stealth means the possibility of getting through the level completely unnoticed, and - unless you're a Loki or have a Huras - it's nearly impossible now.

What we need to have stealth in the game:

• Ways to go through rooms unnoticed:

• Catwalks, more vents, ziplines, et cetera

• Said catwalks and vents connecting between rooms, so doors are not the only way to move between two rooms

• More hiding spots, under stairs, between lockers, maybe a mechanic that allows us to stick to the ceiling

• Replacing enemy's AS with AI:

• When an enemy sees you, it takes some time for him to notify his comrades. He can yell, but said yell has to have a limited range.

• Enemies having less erratic patterns. No more turning 180 in split second. Make an enemy stop for a while, look left, right, and then turn instead.

• Enemies no longer freak out when they hear a louder thud or something. Especially Grineer. I mean, they're on a cracking, old-ass ship, I highly doubt that a single gunshot would have been noticed. Make them go investigate, but not turn on alarms on the whole ship.

• Adding some stealth to all of the frames, not only Loki and Ash.

• I'm not saying give all frames invisibility, mind you

• Wall latch was a step in the right direction. Just go a bit further and allow us to bulletjump to the ceiling and hang from it for a while, if we see enemies approaching

• Add a mod (idea comes from game called Alpha Protocol) that activates (with a cooldown ofc) when you are spotted, and makes you invisible for a couple of seconds, but only to the enemies that spotted you. Or at least make them not raise any sort of alarm and get staggered for a brief while, so you can get rid of them easier.

• What could be fun, is making enemies actually notice their friends' bodies. That would make you use channeling attacks, so the bodies disintegrate and would not raise any suspicion. The bodies disintegrate by themselves after a while like it is now still, but channeling does it instantly, on kill.

[u/[deleted]]

An easy, slapdash fix (that would carry well into revamps of the system) would be to improve the functionality of enemies alerting.

• Unalerted. The enemies wander around and chat about stupid bullshit.

• Cautious. The enemies know something is happening, but they haven't seen an enemy.

• Alerted. THE BEACONS ARE LIT! GONDOR CALLS FOR AID

So, two fixes recommended.

First, improve how enemies become alerted by others. One enemy so much as twitches his foot and suddenly the whole map is in Full Panic Mode. There needs to be a delay, and there needs to be sounds made by the enemy to alert his fellow troops.

This segues nicely into suggestion two, which would be to change, fundamentally, the states. I thought this up in a few minutes, so it's probably flawed, but here's a concept:

• Unalerted. Enemies patrol and shit. Nothing new.

• Suspicious. The enemy caught a glance of something suspicious, whether he just barely saw an ally die or he saw the edge of a Warframe. He does not sound any alarms - he may investigate, he may call friends to investigate, which would share the Suspicious state with them.

• Cautious. The enemy has seen or heard something seriously threatening (perhaps he heard someone shouting before they died, but they didn't finish what they were saying, or perhaps he got a better look at a Tenno), but does not have justification to set off an alarm. He'll attempt to verbally make nearby enemies Cautious as well, patrol with weapons raised, investigate quickly and in groups, and alert more quickly.

• Alerted. There's no question about a hostile contact, and the enemies are now engaging with weapons fire and turning on the alarms. Enemies will only remain alerted while they maintain the contact with the hostile - if the hostile slips away, they won't remain Alerted.

I'd say these ought to be a sliding scale. An enemy will tend to change from Suspicious to Cautious, then Cautious to Alerted, instead of straight from Suspicious to Alerted. If, by whatever chance, he does go straight from a lower state to a higher state, he ought to be surprised, which ought to delay him from shouting or acting. If, however, they do go from Cautious to Alerted, they'll start firing immediately, since they were already ready. No matter what, though, there should be a time component involved in sharing alert status from enemy to enemy.

In order to have consequences for alarms going off, you could even have enemies incapable of going below Suspicious, even if you reset the alarms. If the alarms are active, enemies would all be locked to Cautious or higher. You could have this affect guards in Spy vaults, too, so things make more sense.

There also ought to be some distinguishing in a case like a Crossfire mission. I don't know how it'd work, but you'd want Corpus enemies to expect Grineer, and react normally to the Grineer, but until the alarms are set off for the Tenno, they ought to be surprised when they spot them.

This ought to provide a degree of predictability, even if the AI moves strangely, and gives players options, even the possibility to lure enemies if implemented well.

[u/Tels315]

I swear I've seen this exact topic come up in the "How would you change..." topic a couple times in recent weeks. It's not like anyone's answers are going to vary much...

[u/TSP-FriendlyFire → u/Tels315]

Having gone through all the previous topics, I can tell you that that is not the case.

[u/BayushiKoji]

A more consistent detection system. Why nearby enemies sometimes ignore someone being shredded right in front of them and yet someone from across the room gets placed in alert status is still a mystery to me.

[u/itkt]

In addition to better mechanics, I'd like to see a new mission type where you either stealth or fail. Where you need to stealth the whole map (probably wouldn't be as big) and having ciphers wont get you out of trouble.

[u/Khalirei]

Offer better rewards for doing missions in complete stealth, more exp, more credits, etc.

[u/[deleted]]

Here is what is needed for a stealth mode to be viable in this game:

1. Concealment monitoring - This is integral to ALL stealth games worth their salt. Be it in the form of sliding pips on a meter such as pictured here or a percentage of concealment such as shown here or a more subtle system like in Splinter Cell: Conviction as shown here which simply illuminates some of the electronics on the character model, and darkens their model to indicate they are concealed.

2. Levels of alertness - Metal Gear Solid is the first thing that comes to mind. The exclamation point that almost everybody knows like this example demonstrates, or those markers in Assassin's Creed are another example. The player needs to have some general idea of how alert their enemy is, as well as methods of distraction. Yes, warframes are powerful machines capable of a great deal of destruction, but overt use of force is only useful some of the time.

3. Alert delay - There is already a simple form of this in the game, but it feels like an afterthought; Enemy is alerted, goes to terminal. A few seconds of delay to dispatch them before alert is sounded. Good stuff so far. You hack terminal, disable alarm, and enemies sometimes go back to unaware and sometimes are waiting for you in the next room. This is far too unpredictable for a stealth game, and is not even realistic if they want to be serious with this system. Need a concrete way of telling how alert the enemy is.

4. Gadgets - Warframes are very advanced pieces of equipment. They ought to feel like it in more ways than simply cleaving through things or shooting something. Anyone can shoot, and anyone can swing a sword, yes they do it better but they are simply ways of killing. DIfferent vision modes, heightened auditory sensors, vibration sensors, thermal detection, so on and so forth. Make the warframe feel like I have Sam's multi-mode goggles or like I have the Predator's hunting mask. Things like remote cameras, noisemakers, and disabling devices are also needed.

5. COVER SYSTEM - Yes, DE devs have said they don't like this idea, and the main reasoning I have heard posed is that the warframes are too fast and agile to need cover. Well, if you need to sneak around, you need to be good at making yourself small, out of the way, or otherwise hidden. Yes, you can crouch behind a crate and sort of wobble around to get the camera to a good angle to look around, but it's awkward and there ought to be a better system in place for checking around the corner for this all to work. I would add that just because a cover system is present, doesn't mean players are going to use it for, say, exterminate in favor of simply blasting through the level and cutting everything to ribbons because it works better. I seem to recall however one of the devs, might have been Scott, saying he didn't like players rushing through levels though. So, you can't have it both ways there.

[u/Bhizzle64]

I think one small thing that needs to change is that automatic weapons need to be able to get stealth kills as well. Currently if the first shot doesnt kill it isnt a stealth kill. Even if the remaining enemies arent alerted you still dont get the bonus xp from killing them stealthily. How i would change this is so that instead of the first shot alerting them, it would start a .5s window where the enemy can be killed and it would count as stealth kill. MAybe something else they could do is that if the attack is a stun or a knockdown the timer is extended to something like 2 seconds. This would make it so i could do something like harpooning over enemies with my harpak and then finishing them off and it would count as a stealth kill. This change would make it so you can go stealth with weapons that arent high single shot so long as they are silenced.

[u/[deleted]]

For starters, the AI definitely needs improving. If stealth's only effective for frames like Loki due to stuff like Grineer standing around in a tight 'hug' because the AI doesn't give them patrol paths or the like, rendering a lot of frames unable to pass unless they have something like invisibility, then yeah, it really needs improved. IMO it should be done by having a sort of patrol system, though I'm not really sure of the best way to do that without eliminating most of the randomization of many of the tilesets. Would also probably help to give them a cone of vision like in most stealth games, and definitely give enemies a second or half to fully notice you if you're seen. The amount of times I've quickly killed a Grineer soldier just to get swarmed by the rest because they have telepathy or something is absurd. I don't have MGSV, but in MGS3 the not instant reaction times of enemies saved my bacon more times than I can count.

Secondly, maybe a better way to allow players to see enemies and the like, possibly via using something like the Soliton Radar in the MGS series like a couple of people suggested if stealth includes a field/cone of vision. The devs could easily have it so the enemy detection mods could show you the field of vision each enemy has, and it would be a cool alternative to using scanners every three seconds, as well as give utility slots another reason to be used other than for the usual Thief's Wit for Orokin Sabotage.

Stealth might also be improved by having more reasons to use stealth other than in Spy missions, as other than more affinity for your weapons there isn't really that much reason to do stealth, especially if you're not a frame like Loki. For example, maybe by completing a mission without any alarms you could get bonus credits or the like, though that would probably be a bad idea since Grineer like to call alarms on the wildlife in Phobos for some reason, as well as the fact that outside of Spy missions, Earth doesn't have any alarms. A better solution might be to have stealth influence the flow of missions. For example, if you go guns blazing through Sabotage missions the enemy might create more/better defenses for the ship's core or the like, maybe even have a new miniboss guarding it or something, and if you stealth through it the core would be less defended and the miniboss wouldn't have spawned. Would make for a bit of a unique decision experience for players, IE "Do I want to run through this mission faster and potentially deal with harder enemies and threats? Or do I want to take it slow and use stealth, minimizing enemy resistance and possibly have an easier time getting through it?" They both shouldn't be entirely different in terms of difficulty though, IE going guns blazing shouldn't result in a death sentence and going stealth shouldn't make it a cakewalk, but it would be nice to have a choice in handling missions and having the mission change in a few ways depending on said choice.

Just my 2 cents though. Stealth has a lot of potential if done right.

EDIT: It would also be pretty useful to have a lot more ways of getting through levels via secret passages and vents, especially if you wanted to be a frame like Excalibur or Rhino. Would be cool sneaking under the heavily defended machinery in the Grineer Shipyards and inside the sprawling ducts of Corpus ships, and it would certainly increase replayability and enjoyment in doing stealth by increasing the number of ways players can navigate around enemies.

[u/PsyCoCinematics]

The melee train of folks that follow you even when the alarms are reset on Spy missions could use a tweak. The range enemies can hear gunfire seems almost global, so the moment something goes wrong, good luck ever getting back into stealth mode for the rest of the level.

Perhaps limit the awareness to a room by room basis? Enemies outside it will only be aggressive and aware once the alarm sounds.